Ohhhhhh 🙁 moannnnnnn
The Eng. 102s’ final, endless research paper is in. We have four days in which to grade the monsters, and then I have to post grades on the district’s system. Meanwhile, another set of papers from the wannabe magazine writers is pending — a “brite,” the shortest of short-form journalism.
The magawriters’ efforts will be easy, and besides, there are only about 10 students remaining in that class.
But the 102s…hevvin help us, MOST of them have hung in there through the entire semester. That’s got to be some kind of a record, because by the end of a term a third to half of classmates have dropped a typical community-college course. So it’s GOOD, in one way: somehow we’ve managed to keep them on track.
But…what, really, is ON that track?
I made a little chart dividing up the classmates by the quality of their writing skills. The idea is to grade the weakest writers’ papers first, so as to get the truly, truly awful stuff out of the way while the brain is still relatively fresh. Then plow through the mediocrities, which can be as or more difficult than the bad stuff to grade. And finally have downhill skiing after you’ve reached the point where you can no longer bear to look at the things.
So. We have the “Best,” the “Worst,” and the “Others.”
Or we could say, the “Excellent,” the “Dreadful,” and the “Mediocre.” Or…the “Good,” the “Bad,” and the “Ugly”….
Under the “Best” rubric, we have six classmates, one of whom is really a very good writer. The “Worst” number five. And the “Others”: seven. Only two students have failed to turn in a paper, and one of those fell under the wagon wheels some time back. Neither of them were among the “Worst.” That means, yes: here at the end of the semester we still have to read, assess, try to comment intelligently upon, and apply a grade to five unintelligible pieces of illiterate drivel.
So far I’ve read a paper whose author attempted to organize the entire 2500 words into two paragraphs. I’ve read a 2500-word “research” paper without a shred of documentation. And just now I’m about to take up one in which I entered FIFTEEN corrections in THREE sentences before I gave up and went to bed last night.
What, seriously, am I supposed to do with a student who’s doing the best he or she can but still makes an error about every second word?
Yeah, I understand that some writers who do that have learning disabilities. And I do understand it’s not their fault, whether their brains are wired in some unique way or whether they’re simply victims of Arizona’s half-assed educational system. But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re in my course, and I can’t very well flunk a quarter of the students in any given section — I wouldn’t keep my job long if I did that. And it doesn’t change the fact that these people — maybe as many as a quarter of our “graduates,” such as they are — are going to end up in some hapless employer’s business.
That’s right: 5 out of 18 is more than a quarter of the class: 28%.
And it’s pretty typical.
Postscript: As I was fiddling with this post, one student asked me to let him/her completely rewrite an abysmally failing paper (answer: No) and another asked me to accept NINE late papers because s/he’s had such a tough time this semester (answer: No).
Holy shit.